[42: 535–96] This part of the country has been known to white men about fifteen years. The Indians who before lived here were of the weak yielding kind which is common west of the Cordilleras, too feeble of intellect to make any largely organized resistance and indisposed through indolence and pusillanimity to individually oppose any purpose of the newcomers. Nevertheless it happened, as they were pushed about and then pilfering and assassinating Indian habits caused a spice of vindictiveness to be added to the feeling of contempt with which they were chiefly regarded by the whites, a state of absolute war came to exist and continued, though generally pursued in a very desultory way, for several years. On certain occasions the whites formed volunteer military organizations and fought in short campaigns with some degree of system. These active periods were always ended by a sweeping massacre of Indians with comparatively small loss to the whites and a treaty of peace, the conditions of which practically amounted to this, that the whites in all that part of the country which they chose to occupy or travel through could do as they pleased if they would cease to make an organized business of killing Indians. Even after the last of these “fighting sprees,” as I have heard them called, the surviving Indians within a distance of fifty miles of our village must, I think, have outnumbered the whites. A few hundred [619]yet remain, and there is a fixed camp in which something more than a score of them live during the greater part of the year within a few minutes’ walk of our house. At certain seasons, however, they leave the neighborhood altogether and at these times there are I presume tribal gatherings.

Within twenty miles to the East of us there are numerous miners’ camps and graziers’ cabins scattered through the valleys. Beyond that the mountains are so elevated that even their valleys are rendered impassible during the greater part of the year by the accumulation of snow. At the distance of an easy day’s ride, therefore, in this direction, there is an uninhabited wilderness. Beyond this, at the distance of a hundred miles, in a flat desert region at the Eastern foot of the Sierras there is another line of miners’ camps, beyond which again the red savage holds his own for several hundred miles. Also within a hundred miles to the Southward, there is a considerable body of Indians, living in valleys and high meadows of the Sierras, who do their poor best to keep away from white men. When, however, white men and these Indians meet each tries to kill the other. They are regarded and dealt with as beasts of prey. Some of our friends have lately exchanged shots with them, but they are so far 01f, and there are other settlements so much nearer them than ours that we have no concern with them. With regard to the Indians, therefore, we are not upon the advanced line, but rather upon a secondary line of settlement.

Nevertheless we are occasionally reminded of our close vicinity to the wilderness. Two grizzly bears have passed, unharmed, though one was shot at, and a wildcat has been killed, within a few hundred yards of our house, since we have been here. The Indians, in their primitive costumes, with bows and arrows and papooses strapped to the backs of the women, and with their primitive filth and vermin, and primitive stolidity of expression, often find their way into our doors and sometimes before they are discovered fall asleep in our entrance hall. On such occasions, if any notice is taken of them at all, the habit of most people here, of the several Irish, German, French and Chinese servants we have tried, for instance, is to address them in the same tone, and deal with them in the same manner, precisely, as a mangy street cur is spoken to & dealt with under similar circumstances.

We are some thirty miles within the outer line. This advanced line is formed by a very irregular series of cabins occupied mostly by graziers pasturing their stock in the mountains, with occasionally a camp of miners or prospectors. The graziers may be regarded as fixed settlers. Nearly all of them are emigrants from the Slave States, and have Indian “wives”—concubines.

There are men also who live for the most part along this line who cannot be classified either graziers or miners; men who have no particular [620]occupation but most of whom live chiefly upon wild meat and who pay for their powder and lead, clothing, coffee, tobacco and whiskey mostly with bear and deer skins. Some of them have cabins of their own; most make one of the graziers’ cabins a base of operations; sometimes spending several weeks at it and then assisting the grazier in looking after his stock. At times too they will join a party of miners or of prospectors or explorers or even lend a hand for a few days or possibly a few weeks at an occupation which requires some regular labor, such as harvesting a crop, building a cabin or a saw mill, a mill-dam or a sluice way for placer mining, or they will join a surveying or exploring party, taking the duty of supplying it with meat (game) or that of guide, or of cook and camp-guard, or of all three. Occasionally they come within the more populous districts in which case most of them “go on a spree.” For the most part, however, as far as I have observed, they are not drunkards, though always ready to take a drink when it is offered them and generally carrying a little whiskey about with them which they use when by themselves sparingly. If they become drunkards, like the Indians, they give up the wilderness and live wholly within the settlements, commonly dying very soon of delirium tremens in the County hospital or jail.

There is a much larger number of men whose habits are somewhat similar, and who are little if any more incorporate with the community than these last, the chief difference being that they spend the greater part of their time in prospecting, searching for gold and other treasures, getting their living mainly by placer-mineing (washing particles of gold dust from sand). These also, however, occasionally engage for a day or a few days at a time in fishing, or helping farmers, millers or packmen, for thousands of people within a hundred miles of us live at a distance from waggon roads and receive their supplies either by pack trains sent out by the tradesmen with whom they deal or from pedlars who move their stock on the backs of mules or donkeys. Among the latter class (the solitary prospectors) I have found men of a good deal of intelligence and who have been fairly educated. Most of them have been trained or partially trained in some regular occupation in Eastern or European cities. Invariably, however, they are men of ill-balanced minds, many of them quite as much so, as some who are classed in our Eastern hospitals among the incurable cases of (mild) lunacy.

To return to the outer line of settlers and pioneers. These men are for the most part essentially as foreign to civilization, so far as I can see, as the Indians themselves—in fact more so, for among the Indians the primary crystallization of civilization is generally quite strongly shown in relationships of family and tribe, though here it stops. Among the white pioneers there is generally less of this. Their way of dealing with their women is less civilized than that of the male Indian. It does not follow, the reader should remember, that it is necessarily more cruel but [621]that it is less based on sympathy and sense of unity of interest. Nevertheless these men appear to me to be & to have always been, as a class, more nearly akin, in the constitution of their minds to the Indians than to truly civilized white-men. If it were not for differences of language and the antipathetic prejudice originally given them by early education in a white community towards Indians as a body, they would prefer, I think, to live with a tribe of Indians rather than with a civilized community. I have heard some of them avow that they preferred Indian, negro, Mexican or Chinese women to white. One reason of this I judge to be that any white woman who would adopt their habits and be willing to associate with them on peaceable terms would necessarily be a very wretched and hateful specemin of the white race.

I do not wish to be thought to report altogether animadvertingly of these men. I have a kind and respectful and even admiring feeling toward some of them, but so it is true I have toward some savages. All I mean to express is that I have a strong impression of their essential incompatibility with civilized men and women.

Most of the outer settlers have Indian women living with them. It is the custom of the country to speak of these women as “Indian wives.” They are not wives of course and quite the contrary, being thrown off with no more ceremony than they are taken on, whenever dissatisfaction is felt with the relation. Frequently no paternal obligation is recognized toward their children but this of course varies as does the degree of the constancy of hospitality toward the women, in each case, according to the varying strength of the natural force of amative attachment and of philoprogenitiveness.

The original family of the Indian wife often visits her and indeed frequently lives a considerable part of every year near by her master’s cabin. The men, (her father, brothers—possibly her old husband), occasionally earn a little tobacco, whiskey, or cast off clothes or blankets by catching game, making baskets, hunting cattle that are far-strayed &c. The Indians who habitually have any peaceable association with the whites hereabouts, however, are mostly feeble, dispirited creatures, however, and rarely make themselves in any way in the slightest degree useful to the whites. A few only have courage to steal, even under favorable circumstances, so great is their terror of the white man’s vengeance but when one of the outer settlers misses anything and chances to see an Indian, near at hand, he is very apt to assume that he is a thief, and that it is his duty to vindicate civilization, which he does on the spot either by shooting Qr if convenient by hanging him, the latter being deemed more “high toned.” Our newspapers state that several indians have been observed suspended from trees in this and the next county lately, one of them adds this comment: “supposed to have been thieves.” Nothing more.

[622]

Still nearer where I write there are many mining camps, several ranches (cattle farms), villages, and within a half circle frontier ward of ten miles’ radius, a population of several thousand, of whom a small minority are native Americans of the United States. The rest are Indians & Half breeds, Mexicans, Chinese and native Europeans in not very greatly unequal parts.

Most of them live in rude cabins, shantees, or booths, partly covered with canvas, some in “ratholes,”shallowburrows made in clay banks; a few in tents; and there are several clusters of habitations having somewhat more pretence to comfort & permanence, being covered with clapboards and shingles and painted white, but divided through the interior by canvas screens. Houses of this sort are properly called pavilions by the French, being set up in a wooded country after saw mills have been put at work, almost as easily as a tent and burned down quite as easily. Collections of them here are commonly called “camps” unless there is a land speculation on foot in connection with them, when they may be made to take the title of city.

Our own place of residence in the ancient times (of Buchanan) bore the name of Bear Camp, and though the Postmaster General has given it another, that remains its proper name. It has a population of from two to three hundred and contains three general stores, two “hotels” five other establishments for supplying liquors & cigars, two supplied with Billiard tables and one with a piano, a Livery Stable, Bakery, Foundry, Machine Shop, Smithy and Cobbler’s shop, two or three lodge-rooms and a public hall for dancing and other entertainments. It has a Mexican suburb, an Indian suburb and a Chinese suburb, the latter containing at this time about forty inhabitants. There are three good gardens near the camp, each well irrigated and admirably cultivated, one managed by an Italian, one by a Frenchman and one worked by a company of Chinese, who pay a small rent to citizens for the land but work on their own account, with admirable skill and painful thoroughness and industry.

I have been much puzzled to guess why there is this collection of people always here, and how it is supported. Plainly a considerable number cannot live by anything they earn here and now but besides these the number who seem to be making their living, and a pretty good living too, is more than a stranger can at once account for. The shopkeepers and tradesmen sell goods to miners living in smaller camps around us or to other shop-keepers and peddlars who supply these outer camps. The gardeners have the same market. But I have found it difficult to believe that its demand is so large or so varied as the supply that continues to be provided would seem to indicate. The fact undoubtedly is that the amount consumed or made way with per head of population, both of necessaries and of luxuries of certain kinds and these latter not a few, would very [623]greatly outrun that of any community in Europe or the Atlantic States.

I was not prepared to find in a region so remote from the great centres of civilization so little of rural or backwoods simplicity. The English speaking people are no more unsophisticated here than in Piccadilly or St. Giles’. Even the farmers have more commonly the carriage, style and manners of unfortunate horse jockeys and dissipated market men than of solid, steady and frugal countrymen. Go where you will on the mountains, the hills or the plains, wherever the slightest trail has been formed or the smallest sign of industry—mining, mechanical or agricultural—is to be found, you may also find empty sardine boxes, meat, oyster and fruit cans, wine, ale, olive and sauce bottles, with playing cards and torn leaves of novels, magazines and newspapers, more commonly New York newspapers, but sometimes French, German or English.

Our camp is at the outside of a cluster of five stations of supply of similar character and among them within twelve miles to the Southward there are five public bakeries. We are supplied at our own door with fresh rolls as well as with milk every morning before breakfast. Our bread is of better quality than any I ever tasted made in New England. There are two public breweries, and no better beer is made in the United States than is supplied by one of them. There are three tolerable restaurants and several establishments which must be styled cafes and cabarets rather than bar-rooms or dram shops; being provided with small tables, and two of them with vine covered arbors, where men sometimes rest and refresh themselves in a quiet and temperate way. When away from home I gladly resort to them as an escape from the parlors, dining rooms and bar-rooms of the hotels. Of these there are five of the ordinary dreary Western American kind, of which four on an average make each a new landlord bankrupt every six months. There are eight or ten public billiard tables; there are two hot bath establishments. There are eight or nine livery stables. There is a newsman, who keeps a reading room and also acts as carrier for the European and Eastern magazines and illustrated papers. The stock of clothing materials & of articles for the table to be found in the two dozen stores is much larger & more varied than would be found in most Eastern towns of several fold larger population & of several fold greater average wealth. There are established brokers, nurses, midwives, horolagers, barbers, sign-painters, metal-roofers. And this list of our sources of supply and distribution indicates another condition which I was not prepared to find in this remote wild region, in the variety of trades and handicrafts represented in the population. When it has happened that the services of a slater, thatcher, glazier, cooper, sadler, painter, confectioner, pastry cook, florist, piano tuner were wanted, someone previously unknown in the required capacity has come forth in good time from among our neighbors more or less fairly prepared for the occasion.

Few men, however, long hold fast by any single occupation. Our [624]baker not only makes and distributes bread but sells cakes, beer, confectionary, tobacco and segars. At the same time & place he does business as a gold broker, as an express agent, as the Treasurer of two or three mining companies, and as Justice of the Peace. To customers who sit under his little awning to enjoy their cakes, beer or cigars, he gratuitously supplies the latest newspapers & magazines and cards or dominoes. German by birth of course, he is a well-disciplined, exact, honest, frugal, thrifty, sober and much esteemed citizen. Again there is a gentleman whom I personally know as a surgeon and a naturalist of large and varied observation, educated at the University of Paris. By his advertisements in the newspapers and otherwise I know that he is also proprietor of a white-smithing shop, an apothecary’s shop, and manager of a mine; he has recently been admitted to the bar and offers his services as an attorney, counsellor and notary. He announces that he is prepared to draw up legal papers in French, Spanish and English. He is canvassing for capital for projected smelting works and is a candidate for the office of Coroner and Superintendent of the County hospital.

The two facts which I have indicated, that of an extraordinary average demand for certain material results of civilization and that of a general readiness and disposition to turn one’s hand rapidly & frequently from one thing to another and to hold to nothing ploddingly or with long forecast, these two form the most striking distinctions of general application between the people here and any other I have observed.

Both may perhaps be reduced to one. In all old countries, public opinion acting in infinite forms is constantly operating with immense force on every man to prevent him from behaving not only illegally but improperly, that is inappropriately to his station, his station being the position in which he is expected to serve others & be served by others. For convenience sake, stations are classified into classes, and within certain limits the habits appropriate to each class and to many subdivisions of each class are so well established that everyone knows the indications of them which are given in forms, color, dress and carriage and is governed accordingly.

If an Englishman should be walking in the country at dusk of evening and an object should cross the road a little way off with regard to which, without having his attention particularly called to it at the time, he should be afterwards examined and cross examined, it would commonly appear that if he was able to state confidently that the object had been a man rather than a cow, he would also be able to express some idea about the social class of the man. Thus he would say, “I think he must have been a man of the lower class rather than a gentleman.” Again if pressed he would find an impression which would lead him to regard it as more probable that the man was a factory workman than an agricultural laborer, that he was a small tradesman rather than a gentleman’s [625]servant and so on. If he had been sitting in a railway carriage with a man and had heard him speak a few sentences if only in answer to a traveller’s enquiry about the road, he would make similar distinctions, similar reference to a class with much more precision and confidence.

More or less of this habit all civilized men must have. But the degree of it, the distinctness and tangibility of the classification and of the laws of duty and of requirement vary. Here by distinction not merely with England but with any community of the Atlantic or the Mississippi region, there is comparative abolition of class and consequent social anarchy. Our blacksmith is called upon to shoe two horses and make some repairs on a peddlar’s waggon, in a hurry; he works hard, completes the job, is paid three dollars and being heated and dry, he goes where—to the pump; no, to the “hotel,” and calls for, beer? gin? no; champagne or Burgundy, undoubtedly more refreshing & better for him.

There is a poor widow in the village whom my wife employs to do occasional chores, (a charwoman). She lately heard that a birth had occurred in the house of a friend ten miles away and at once ordered from the livery stable a handsome carriage with a pair of horses and a driver to take her to make a call of congratulation Such incidents do not now impress me on account of the want of frugality which they illustrate as much as on account of the evidence they offer of the weakness here—the practical extinction of one [of] the great conservative forces of society. The precept and sense of propriety, which directs that a man should carry himself as becomes his station in life, assumes a continuity of occupation. The station of today must at least be built upon the station of yesterday. But here, when a newcomer is found among us it is impossible for us to judge him by reference to the standards of any station he has previously occupied. And we are all newcomers The consequence is that the habit of dealing with others or of expecting to be dealt with by others with reference to such a standard is impracticable & is rapidly eradicated. There is a rapid increase of freedom of thought, freedom of suggestion and consequently a rapid multiplication of each man’s wants, of each man’s demands upon his fellow men or upon commerce, and a rapid weakening of each man’s habit & disposition to follow any course which society seems to have laid out for him in a plodding, tedious, persistent or consistent way.

If a man who has shown ability in any direction, driving a stage coach or building a mill-dam, chooses to give advice in a question of law or medicine or theology or political economy to which he has never given an hour’s study, it is not unlikely to be taken with as much respect & confidence as that of men who have labored hard through a course of years to fit themselves to give such advice.

Nearly all the advantages of civilization which depend on special and priveledged conditions of a part of the community, natural as well as [626]artificial, are thus wanting here. The advantages, for instance, for serving the community which would be generally possessed by the son or daughter of parents who have always been in easy circumstances, who have long maintained a high reputation for thrift, honesty, and patriotism, & who have had a strong will as well as ability to educate their children carefully, are made of no account. They start on the same footing with the vagabond children of vagabond parents who have always been both reckless and helpless as to the training of their children. And the condition which I thus refer to is not due solely to the habits which a constant experience of dealing with persons of unknown antecedents must establish, but also partly to a prevailing disposition to distrust the reality of such advantages and a habit of confusing naturally established advantages of social position, standing, reputation or character, with those which in older communities are artificially imposed. I don’t know but this over reaching rebellion is as strong with New Englanders as with Irish and Germans. The New Englanders here are many of them resolute Protestants against all the standards of respectability which are commonly held up in New England.

One man who has been very successful in gaining the confidence & respect of the community said to me of an applicant for employment as a clerk—“He told me he had a minister’s certificate of his character-when a young man tells me that I always set him down for a sly one. No minister & no church can ever manufacture a character for me. I don’t want a tub that can’t stand on its own bottom.”

“Life” here is remarkably open, a man’s habits, qualities, tendencies are more generally displayed on an average than anywhere else in the world. And life is nowhere else I think so “many-sided.” We turn from one thing to another, from one mental condition to another with frequency & with the facility and grace which comes of much practice. It is the soldierly habit, surging, joking, going in a drove careless to what like sheep; then face to face with grimmest death, passionate, intense, sublime in self forgetfulness in love of cause or country, then again given to petty trickery, deceitful and ready to gain an indulgence of appetites either by the meanest petty larceny or the most awful piracy and murder. This many sidedness causes for a time a perplexity. Everyone recognizes, proclaims, and most insist emphatically and jubilantly in the fact that there is a grand difference between the public opinion, in what is approved, expected, required, demanded of a man here and elsewhere in the world wherein newspapers are printed and champagne or lager bier is within the reach of everyone. Is it greater love of justice, greater humanity, greater sympathy, greater honesty and frankness, greater willingness that others as well as oneself should be free? Each will be said on occasion but the next occasion will contradict it. There is an intenser love and intenser hate moving men here in one direction or another constantly than is [627]often manifested in communities at the East or in Europe, and yet the means of developing & manifesting community of sentiment are exceedingly feeble. And it is not intenser love or hatred of freedom, truth, justice or of one another. No man having the question clearly before him and comparing event with event for many months will hold to any such theory. The condition about which all that there is here of peculiar conservatism and all that there is here of peculiar recklessness centres is I finally conclude that of Slipshod.

Men love so dearly to be slipshod that they will even for a time be systematic and intense and far-reaching in their efforts to quench whatever tends to put to shame, establish penalties or otherwise antagonize their continued following of slipshod ways.

I am confident that this is the one grand characteristic quality of the frontier, and without asserting that there are no exceptional instances I believe that if one carefully studies any striking example of energy of a kind which is at all characteristic of this rather than of any other Christian country, it will not be difficult to follow its stem down to a root of slipshod impulse.

Lynch Law itself; with all its outward show of thorough deliberation and system, is nothing but an intense form of the common effort to get along without real and prolonged deliberation and system. It is a darning together and inking over of the faded rags which the beggar would not if he could exchange for clean whole cloth. Just enough law or show of law to maintain the greatest degree of lawlessness under which men can have any use of neighbors.

There is then something more than a general forgetfulness or neglect of the constraints of old social order. There is a positive and wilful withdrawal from them, a contempt for and hatred of them as impositions, such as men feel toward discarded idols or superstitions which have lost their hold on them. There seems to be a commonly prevailing suspicion, at least, that whatever leads men to adopt habits of frugality, steadiness and plodding industry also fosters a disposition to override or outreach or oppress those of more open and careless habits.

I have been in the practice of going about the country within fifty miles, sometimes taking a pack mule and camping conveniences. Three times absent & sleeping always on the ground, several weeks-travelling each time on an average 250 miles entirely beyond fixed settlements, much of the way beyond any settlements even temporary. In these latter cases I have generally had some of my family with me and a guide or servant. I was leaving the tent the morning after I had first camped here in this way with my wife, intending to return to it for dinner, which was to be ready for us at a certain hour, when my wife said to the guide—“I hope you will not go out of sight of the tent, as there are some things in it which I should be very sorry to have stolen.” The man swore that he [628]would not leave it and, by way of further assuring my wife, said that I might hang him right up to the tree over the tent if I caught him away from it whenever we came back. “But,” he added, “there ain’t no need of watching it. There would not no man dare go nigh it that knows anything about California ways.”

“Why not?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

“Why, Sir, suppose a man was to see the tent here and should want to go to it, how does he know that you ain’t somewher around here; and, suppose you should see him, what would you do? Why he hain’t no business there has he? Of course not and if you see him of course you’d shoot him, wouldn’t you? Of course you would, if you see him going to your tent, cause you know he couldn’t want to go there for no good. He knows you know that. Everybody knows you knows that. You bet there wouldn’t nobody go to it. They’d go out o’ their road to keep shut of it. You bet they would.”

When we came back the man was not present, and no preparation had been made for dinner, and on going to the nearest watering place, which was not in sight of the tent, I found him lying on the ground asleep but for certain private reasons I did not hang him.

The village in which we live compares favorably in its general appearance with other villages that I have seen in a similar position in regard to the frontier. I am constantly told that seeing it now, I can hardly imagine what a different place it was a few years ago. Then a night seldom passed in which there was not a quarrel in which pistols were used by numbers of persons and a gentleman assures me that several times in the course of a few months that he lived here, on going out of his door in the morning, he saw the dead bodies of men who had been taken off in these entertainments, & who was killed last night was almost always asked at the breakfast table. The morning after I arrived here, I rode out with an old resident and presently passed about thirty unenclosed heaps of earth, some of them having stakes or small rude crosses stuck in them. “Graves—” said my companion as he observed me looking at them. “Yes—we used to always put ’em in here, fellows that died natural deaths—In their boots.” I found afterwards that not all had been shot, but a majority. These are not the only uncared for graves. My little girl one day while playing near the house picked up something which like little Peterkin she brought in wondering what it was. A woman’s skull, with a bullet hole through it. The body had been buried somewhere in the vicinity and probably so near the surface that beasts had torn it to pieces. And upon numbers of heaps of earth unmarked by stake or stone, I have come at different times, which I have generally found upon enquiry recalled to the older residents some “shooting scrape” of what they call “the old times.”

Making all due allowance for the proneness to exaggeration which [629]is very evident of those from whom I receive my accounts, it does not admit of doubt that a few years ago, not only in this but in all of the adjoining settlements which I have visited, deadly weapons were used with frequency, “every day,” say my informants, speaking of various camps or villages, the population of which did not exceed three hundred on an average, men & women. The machinery of law was in existence; there were justices and sheriffs or sheriffs’ deputies in these communities and lockups or jails in one or two of them but the officers of the law and the most sober and well educated men carried revolvers and knives and not unfrequently used them without law.

The many comments and explanations which I have heard made by men who were participants in the excitements and dangers of the earlier period all indicate that the condition from which the common insecurity of life most obviously & immediately resulted was not solely that of the diverse sources from which so many men came together and the consequent ignorance and want of confidence with which each man regarded most of those about him, but that it grew out of the fact that an unusual proportion of those thus brought together had already before they came here been established in habits of distrustfulness, of holding themselves in readiness to resist the disposition of others to cheat, oppress, and impose upon them—and that this habit was simply developed into a fiercer form by their sense of special ignorance of the character of the great mass of those with whom they were here thrown in contact. This ignorance was greatest toward those whose previous education and associations had been most different from his own. Towards these therefore suspicions, jealousies, prejudices, and ill-defined fears were readily roused and easily exasperated to a degree which especially under excitement of drink or anger, or mortal danger, almost made one a maniac and for the time being, quite made him a savage.

Every propensity in human nature, favorable to the production of deadly feuds, seems to have been [boldly and joyously] indulged by every man to an unnatural degree—a degree which would have been unnatural to him in more maturely organized communities. Composed of such heterogeneous materials, there being in each settlement representatives of many nations and tribes, and those of the same nation born and bred often at the greatest distance apart actually and socially, whenever a stranger arrived he was as it were instinctively led to seek out his natural allies; almost every man had one or more “chums” or “partners,” and each set of chums had alliances with other sets; alliances not made formally, but as came naturally from the readiness with which a good understanding could be arrived at. Such alliances were offensive and defensive and nothing was so evidently the requirement of prudence, as to look well to your friends. Of course it followed that the more careful each man was to take care of his friends the more careless he was in thought for [630]the life or the rights in any way of those who were not his friends.

A large proportion of those who lost their lives appear to have been Mexicans or Negroes (Indians never count). Southerners come next, Irishmen next, I do not remember the grave of a single murdered New Englander, though there were not a few here and they carried arms and used them. In the large majority of cases these deaths resulted from some unfair dealing or suspicion of unfair dealing, cheating at cards, imposition in trade, robbery, attempt to carry a point, (perhaps a vain desire to appear well in conversation or debate), by false statements, brow-beating or unwarranted assumption. Whatever it was, the men with whom it originated seem seldom to have been the victims, but the moment either of them drew his weapon, others would draw and either side quarrels or a general “shooting scrape” result and death come to someone with no interest in the original quarrel. Of course all present on such occasions become more or less excited but many seem to become possessed of a blinding fever of destruction. Drawing and cocking their revolver they look for somebody to shoot at. The choice is made instantly and by instinct rather than judgment, and instinct discriminates in favor of those most akin. At least this is in part, I think, the explanation of the greater number of Mexicans and other colored men who fell, though it [is] also true that the Mexicans were more given to certain forms of imposition, more suspicious, more ready to resort to the knife, and not as well equipped with good firearms, on an average, as the men who came here from a greater distance.

As ignorance is the parent of credulity and passion is contagious, a ready credence was commonly found for any man’s charges; complaints or suspicions against strange neighbors among all his more natural allies, and proposals to punish or enforce remedies for alledged wrongs or to guard against anticipated dangers by bold attacks were taken up with enthusiasm and executed with dash. Men not merely stood blindly by those to whom they would expect to turn for self-protection but against common enemies, no matter what made them enemies, practiced without compunction all the strategy ordinarily immoral which defensive war is ever supposed to justify.

Nothing seems to have been deemed mean or cowardly or unworthy of a man, by which a very distant or foreign neighbor, when for the time being considered an enemy, could be outwitted and overcome. One of my neighbors, an amiable & estimable man, told me that he had seen and had part in a distribution of presents to Indians, ostensibly as a peace-offering, in which were handkerchiefs intended to convey the poison of Small-pox. Another, that he had seen some Indian prisoners tortured by white captors in the indian manner, some mutilated and set free as a warning, and many white men wearing Indian scalps and even more [631]barbarous trophies. Those most prone to these extreme degradations seem to have been European born. And though these may be considered occurrences of real war, it would appear that much the same feelings were always easily excited toward Mexicans, negroes and half-breeds, in which case they fared little better than Indians. And so generally the more distinct the line of seperation from one’s natural friends or allies was felt to be, the less chance had any man the other side of it to be respected in any way. It was not to be supposed for instance in any fracas or difficulty involving numbers that an unknown man was possessed of honor, or honesty or rights of any kind, or that honor or honesty or a fair field was to be observed in dealing with him.

This is the general impression of the common tone of opinion & impulse which I derive from the many narratives given me by persons who in my experience of them are honest, honorable, brave and sober.

In such a state of society men appear to expose very rapidly qualities of character which they had not before been suspected even by themselves to possess. “It was a terrible school;” said one, “in three months after I landed in California, I did not know myself, my character was so changed.”

Traces of it, or I should rather say, broad tracks which surely will not be effaced in more than one lifetime yet remain. The community, if there can be said to be a community at all, is so strangely unintegrate. Each man yet [42: 501] has his friends and allies, vaguely bonded with him perhaps, and his enemies to whom he is but vaguely antagonistic perhaps but beyond a limit more or less contracted, hardly anyone realizes and acts habitually upon the presumption which is the backbone of civilized society, that others have common interests with him or that he has common interests with others.

Of course there are alliances within alliances. A Mexican is nearer than an Indian I think to most of us whites; so is a Chinaman, though oweing to the fear of their competition hatred of them is more active & more frequently expressed. And there are alliances which are not the result merely of spontaneous, unexpressed understandings. Nowhere else have I known such organizations as Free Masons, Odd Fellows, Sons of Temperance and Knights Templars to be so important, as they are here. Political clubs also, both secret and acknowledged in their organization & proceedings, exist in [42: 497–98] every settlement & few voters of any class are not enlisted in them. Among the young men of my acquaintance I find that there are members of six different secret societies, each of which occasionally has meetings in the village. Two of them have established each a seperate enclosure for a graveyard. I have no doubt the ends they have in view are good, and the time of the members is comparatively well spent at their meetings but it can hardly be that such organizations [632]do not stand in the way of what is most needed here, an all-embracing relationship based on the confidence, respect and interest of each citizen in all and all in each.

Whatever degree of pure good fellowship there may be in the motive which causes men to form these formally organized & administered alliances, the broader & simpler ones to which I have referred clearly rest largely on an essentially selfish base. At the bottom is the thought, “You stand by me & I will stand by you.” The want of regard for life, & much more for any right or possession less sacred than that of life, which is often manifested under conditions where an understanding of this kind is most difficult to be assumed, is even yet very shocking.

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[42: 279–80] The formal organization of Law is necessarily of little value as a protection against wrong among such people as we have here. About an eighth of all are Indians, Mexicans, negroes and Spaniards, or men whose blood is a mixture of some of these & that of some of the races of Northern Europe. Not one in fifty of them has the faintest comprehension of a civilized system of law and government. The exercise of the right of property is to them simply the exercise of the power of the stronger man, and they cannot yet see that assassination offers a means of enforcing this power less desireable than the baton of the constable, or the sabre of the dragoon except as it is less safe to him who makes use of it.

There is no definite line of separation between those who are more & those who are less barbarous in this respect. People of various education are singularly mingled. The house next mine for instance is occupied by an Irishman, the next by a Mexican, the next by a New Yorker, the next again by a Mexican, the next by a Chinese, the next by an Italian, the next again by a Chinese; on the other side, an African, a German, a German Jew, an Italian, a Virginian, an Irishman, a German, a South Carolinian, an Italian, follow one another. At this moment I see a group in the street composed of an Irishman, an Italian, and a Digger Indian woman with a white baby which she carries not in the Indian or the Italian but the English manner. She is dressed in printed calico, & wears shoes and white stockings, while the Irishman wears a blanket, as a Serape’s, in the Mexican fashion. While I was writing the last sentence, they all went together into a bar-room which is kept by an Irishman; the mistress of this Irishman is a Mexican half-breed.

[Precisely the same understandings of property rights or the same control of personal inclinations, passions & idiosyncracies in subordination to common interests as prevails in Kent or Lancashire, cannot be assumed by anyone to rule under these circumstances. With at least half the community [633]the Law as law is never distinctly recognized. Our officer of the law is not known to them as an officer of the law. When the life of one of these persons is threatened, he does not think of the Law, that is of the community, as his protector, or if his property is stolen or taken from him by force, he does not know to] whom or where to go for official assistance to recover it. He must depend on himself and the voluntary assistance of others, just as he must if he proposes to recover a horse that had broken his trail rope and strayed, or as he must if a bear had hugged him and broken his ribs, so he cannot provide himself with food in his customary way. Ultimately through friendly action the law may help him, the Sheriff may hear of the case, correspond about it with the Sheriff of the next county South—reaching a hundred miles from here, and possibly thus put agencies in operation by which the property will be recovered. But the injured man, even in that case, will very vaguely if at all comprehend that the Sheriff has been acting in any other than his individual capacity. He will respect him for his action, not as the representative of the community but as one man of great cunning and power in accomplishing what he undertakes, and with whom it will be well to be on friendly terms.

The practical result is I suppose as great a degree of safety both for the life & property of the civilized & well disposed part of the community as has yet been attained in many parts of Italy and Spain, or in Tipperary or even many streets of London.

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[42: 492–96] In a conversation a few days since with our most worthy local magistrate, he remarked that of course very little could be learned from the records of our Courts of the amount of crime. He thought, for instance, that since he had lived here, (ten years?) at least four thousand horses had been stolen in the county and run off. Less than five hundred certainly had ever been recovered and even in these latter cases very rarely indeed had the thieves been brought to court. Indeed it was rarely that any attempt was made to apprehend them, though they were often shot, had been shot by their pursuers. Formerly the horse thieves were nearly all Mexicans, but lately a good many Southerners had been in the business.

The robbery of Chinese is of daily occurrence—literally so. “I do not think,” said the Judge, “that in the last year and a half any twenty four hours has passed without a robbery of the Chinese in this County.” It is so common that the Chinese scarcely ever complain of it—taking it as one of the misfortunes of business which all must expect to encounter occasionally.“Except in two or three cases where the Chinese have been so fortunate as to shoot them, I do not think any of the robbers in these [634]cases have been punished. Sometimes the sufferers complain, but when they do nothing comes of it. Not long since a Chinaman here in front of my house raised a great cry, ’That man robby me! that man robby me!’ closely following a wellknown robber, who being much hated by the people here was presently arrested and taken before a Justice. The Chinaman did not go into the Justice’s office, but running about outside again & again told his story. The Justice must have heard him but did not ask him to come in. However, as the Chinaman’s bag of gold dust was found on the robber and there was some other circumstantial evidence against him, and the Grand Jury was in session, the Justice sent him to Jail and a day or two afterwards he was brought before the Grand Jury who discharged him, for want of evidence, the Chinaman not being called before them.”

“I heard,” continued the Judge, “a dozen of our young men talking of this occurrence, and from what was said, I made up my mind that if the man had confessed the robbery, or if it had been proven against him beyond all question, a majority would have voted to discharge him.” The views they expressed were that the Chinamen were a nuisance anyway, their competition with white men tended to reduce wages, and whoever helped to discourage them from coming here was a public benefactor, no matter what his character might be in other respects.

Very rarely indeed was any resistance made to these robbers of the Chinese, unless white men were present who were likely to suffer. Last week, a man lost a revolver here in the village. He learned that a Chinaman had found it, who had gone to some diggings on the Chowchilla Creek. A Chinese offered to guide him to the place and he accordingly went there, taking a friend with him. Arriving at the Chinese camp after dusk, they concluded to spend the night. During the night the camp was attacked by three white men. The visitors being angry at having their rest disturbed, got up and fired at the robbers, killing one, breaking the arm of another. The third escaped. It was ascertained that they belonged to a company of eight who were proceeding regularly through the district. The following week one of our County newspapers gave a playful account of their operations, (which, by the way, were not at all interrupted by this “accident,”) as follows:

Barring accidents, such as happened [to] them last week, they are likely to succeed in their undertakings, as they have shown great caution in their movements so far. To guard against any alarm being raised in their rear, as soon as they robbed one China camp they would march all the Celestials ahead of them to the next, where they would increase their booty and number of hostages. They kept this up until their Celestial army began to languish for forage (the line of march being through an inhospitable region), when it was disbanded.

[635]

The other county paper contains nothing on the subject, and it is but very rarely that the incidents of this constant war are noticed at all, in the newspapers, almost never unless they are thought amusing.

In illustration of the more common proceeding, the Judge said,

The (late) District Attorney of the County confirmed the Judge’s statements, but added that very rarely indeed did any white man who had not the reputation of being himself a robber and ruffian suffer, except from petty pilfering and horse-stealing.

“I have lived here eight years and have travelled about constantly, but no one ever attempted to rob me but once.”

“Do you generally go armed?”

“Always. I never go from my office to my house—[a distance of a thousand yards in the middle of the shire town] at night, without carrying my pistol in my hand. Do you not go armed?”

“Never,” said I, “unless when I am carrying bullion.”

“By the way,” said he, “here’s a letter which Judge ______ asked me to give you, I had forgotten it till now.” The letter informed me that the writer, a Judge of the adjoining County, had reason to believe that there was a plan to rob our “treasure” while it was being carried from the mills to my office, and he thought best to put me on my guard. (Three [636]times besides this within a year and a half I had warnings of this kind, from Sheriffs or other officers of the law, but the attempt was never made.)

The County Sheriff informed me that since he had held his office, two men had been legally executed for murder.

“What proportion do these executions bear to the homicides in the County in that period?” I asked.

“Not one to thirty.”

“Including Chinamen and Indians, do you mean?”

“No.—Oh! altogether? Not one in fifty, no, not one in fifty, certainly.”

He made similar statements to those above reported of the Judge with regard to the Chinese and said that these crimes were increasing. As men learn that they can rob the Chinese with impunity, they resort to this method of filling their pockets more readily.

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[42: 486–90] Yesterday Judge ______ asked me: “Did I not see J.B. in your office?”

“Yes.”

“Are you doing much business with him, now?”

“He has some considerable contracts for transportation.”

“I think I may as well tell you something that came to my knowledge about him this week. A few nights since, a negro man who lives on ______ [forty miles away in another county] came to my house and wanted to see me in private. He had something to say which he seemed to be afraid to disclose but after some encouragement it came out. He said that a few nights ago, while he was asleep in his cabin, the door was suddenly burst open and three men instantly sprang upon him, jerked him out of his bed, threw him on the ground and put a revolver to his head. They then lighted a candle and produced a paper and pen and ink. The paper was a bill of sale to J.B. of all his cattle, these being about all his earthly property, and they demanded that he should sign it, which in fear of his life, he did. The signature was witnessed, and then a bible was brought out; he was required to get on his knees and take an oath that he would never state what had occurred or deny that he had freely and for a satisfactory money consideration sold his cattle to J.B. He was then ordered to go to bed again, and one of the men stood guard over him till near daylight while the others drove away the cattle.”

This man, J.B. ordinarily appears a rather amiable, frank, moderate and considerate but unpretending and not very intelligent man. Among his friends he bears the character of “a good fellow.” There is noth[ing] of the ruffian or the bravo about him, as I have seen him, and [637]he has been in my office hundreds of times. I feel confident that under favorable circumstances, he would have grown up a very quiet and inoffensive member of civilized society. Yet if in civilized society, well organized, he indulged in his present habits of discussion, he would be seldom a week out of jail. Twice since I have known him, that is within two years he has been shot once—at a ball, and once at a political meeting of his own party when a discussion became warm. He carries I believe two or three bullets in his body previously received, and I never saw him without a revolver at his waist. He was born in one of the Eastern Slave States but has been on the frontier for ten years or more. Although a violent secessionist, having often cheered for Jeff Davis, he was once bought by a candidate during the period of the war, for four hundred dollars in gold paid down, and a larger sum paid pro rata for all Union votes above a certain number cast at the precinct nearest his residence. It would be hardly just, perhaps, to say that he is a fair specemin of the Southerners here, but, if I had not been informed of his night-business, I should certainly have thought that he was at least not an unfavorable specemin of them. There are men living near here who are known to have been guilty of far greater crimes, and there are very few Southerners among the settlers hereabouts, whose sudden anger I should feel it any safer to provoke by the expression for instance of my opinions about the rights of negroes, or the question of the true economy of states in dealing with people of inferior civilization when they had no pecuniary interest in my life.

Is there not a quite sufficient reason for this? Think what the effect must have been upon European emigrants to be brought into the relation of master of the enslaved and debilitated African savages of the South. Here there is another frontier, not a tangible geographical frontier, but a frontier between civilization and barbarism quite as truly as that gradually moving line, on which white men and red men have been contending so long. A process of education has been going on upon that line and here I see its immediate results. That “the black man has no rights which the white man is bound to respect” is a conviction fastened in the minds of my Southern neighbors so deeply that I should no more expect to remove it by argument in most cases than to restore the virtue of an abandoned woman by sermons, or to induce the indians yonder to adopt habits or regular labor by the offer of high wages. Nor are they any more able to practically believe that a coloured woman can be chaste or that her chastity is a matter of consequence and should be guarded by the community. They have been thoroughly educated in a different conviction. That a considerable proportion of the recent European emigrants who are here their fellow citizens and tavern associates are very ready to adopt similar views of the rights of colored people, I need not say. Nor can it be difficult for anyone to see what follows where Mexican, Indian, [638]Chinese and negro are all found together. The foundation of civilized society is not a community of mutual requirement and service, in the protection of the fruits of labor, of the condition of chastity and other matters, which is bounded by arbitrary lines, or by lines which may be stretched or contracted by individuals according to their personal opinions & prejudices. These corruptions with regard to the Indian, the negro & the Chinese cannot exist without making other corruptions. The whole framework of Society is necessarily lax in these sparsely settled communities, and the man who has learned to think that negroes, indians, Mexicans, Chinese, half-breeds, may properly enough be treated as a sort of outlaws, or on different principles of right and duty from other men, does not require the inducement of a very strong demand from his passions, his prejudices, his lusts, his covetousness or his pride to be exerted to make him forget law, and civilized customs in dealing with any other men. Yet an alliance such as the more degraded whites are obliged to connect themselves with, extending & ever so feebly connecting them in interest with the great republic of the nation, is educative, so far as they realize it & are true to it.

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[42: 479–83] I take from the newspapers of the day of this writing three short paragraphs, which will serve to illustrate not only the characteristic forms and methods of pioneer advance but the characteristic line of thought in regard to the murder of certain classes of men and women which prevails among the less ignorant and uncultivated members of pioneer bodies of the European race at the present day. Taken in succession the three reports will also furnish an indication of the usual stages of progress by which Indians disappear from and European communities occupy the wilderness. The first, from the Marysville Express is part of a correspondent’s letter from a region which may be considered to be just fairly reached by the skirmishing parties of the advancing whites, which is described as follows:

a barren sage plain, with no vegetation, and save a few lizards, horned toads, snakes, jackals, rabbits, grasshoppers and sage hens, not a living thing can be found. There are but few small alkali flats on the Snake, and where it has been tried, nothing will grow on these plains.

It might be supposed that the Indians who had fallen back upon such a region as this would be left to the peaceable misery which it offered them; the whites, however, are bound to go through it, and as usual an interchange of bullets and arrows has occurred. Reporting some of the incidents the correspondent goes on to speak of the Indians as follows: [639]

by long experience, I find they are civil and good only when dead. Then the tomahawk and scalping knife are at rest, and peace rests in the forest shades. Then wolves howl their requiems over the sad relics of their departed lords. Then life is safe, and there are no shuddering thoughts of the many innocent emigrants, endeavoring to blaze the trail and break the sod of civilization in the far West, who were inhumanly butchered by these ruthless savages. Yet the cry is, “Lo! the poor Indian.”

A specimen of the second stage is found in the Owen’s River Valley, a district of fixed agricultural settlements, where some cattle have recently been stolen from the settlers not, as is supposed, by the indians of the vicinity, but by some marauders from a distance. It was enough to suspect that the thieves were Indians however and the correspondent of the “Sacramento Union” narrates what action the whites thought proper to take in the premises, as follows:

the whites are killing off the Indians on all sides. At Big Lake thirty-five “went under,” and two more eight miles below Bishop creek. One succeeded either in escaping or in drowning himself, it is uncertain which, at Bend City, in rather a remarkable manner. He had been confined in a house, his hands tied behind him, and was closely guarded. Under some pretense he was allowed to leave the house for the bank of the river, and though he was accompanied by two armed whites, as soon as he approached near enough to the stream, he dove, head foremost, into it, and that was the last seen of Lo! the poor Indian. This killing of the Indians may look barbarous to many, but so long as the Government neglects to protect the settlers, they must protect themselves.

There follows in the same paper from a correspondent at Fort Boise in an account of a third stage, in which the habits of the men, trained by such necessary warfare with the indians, are more fully exhibited.

Ferd. Patterson and his crew govern Idaho. On the principal thoroughfares eastward gangs of men collect to rob, steal and murder with impunity, there being no civil law to interfere with them. I think I am safe in saying that not a day passes in this part of the Territory without one or more men meeting a violent death. No one ever hears of a conviction for crime or punishment for an offense. It is a “weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth.” If Milton had lived now-a-days he would have banished Satan into Idaho in preference to the infernal regions. Extract from a Letter to a Portland Merchant. Sacramento Union.

The following is an official report of the Governor of Idaho, made in 1866.

I have already stated that my reports of personal experience & observation, refer to what I am constantly assured is a state of society exhibiting a great improvement in civilization over that which existed here immediately after the Indians had [been] finally & effectually dispossessed. It is a state greatly better than that which is found in the more advanced pioneer settlements of the present moment, as the above writer indicates and as I have been often told by those who have been recently dwelling “over the mountains.” It is greatly better than that which appears to exist in a region a day’s ride to the South of us, wherein occurred the incidents referred to in the following newspaper matter. [4th of July murders outlaws] One of the reputed associates & friends of this outlaw spoken of has been lately residing among us, following the profession of a gambler. He once came into my office displaying two revolvers and a dirk-knife—and is an active man in our elections.

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[42: 485] I have been more struck with the education in injustice, disloyalty (non fealty to law) and all the vices of barbarism which is constantly going on upon the frontier in the case of my friend ______, an amiable, law abiding industrious New Englander, than anyone else. The remains of a man having been found some ten miles from his house, who it was suspected had been murdered, he proposed to me that an Indian known to be near at hand but against whom there was not the [641]slightest evidence that would be listened to for a moment by a civilized Court, should be shot, quite as a matter of course. When I reasoned with him against such an atrocity, he answered, “Well I see I was wrong—but it’s the way of the country and it never occurred to me before that it was not right.”

Six months afterwards, an indian woman whom my wife had employed in washing while we were living in camp, told her that she [was] going to a mourning and could not be back for some weeks. My wife asked who of her kindred had died and found it was the indian who had been suspected of this supposed murder. The circumstances of his death were these. He had obtained some liquor at a camp where several indian women are kept by white men, and when drunk had made some disturbance. Having been turned out of a house, he staggered off some distance and being unarmed and quite drunk, began throwing stones toward the house. One of the stones broke a window, whereupon a white man walked out of the house, and shot him. The indian being well known, his death, which occurred some fifteen miles from the court house, was generally spoken of, but no coroner’s inquest was held and I never heard the assassination alluded to in any terms other than such as would have been appropriate to the shooting of a bear.

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[42: 456–63] Mr H. P. Arnold in his Recollections of Thomas Noon Talfourd, contributed to the Boston Post, says of him:

He was very eloquent, and could carry a jury with him to almost any point he chose. I heard him on one occasion make a superb argument in a case where his client was suing a man who had injured his horse by hard driving and cruel treatment. He obtained ample damages, but I don’t think he spoke ten minutes about the horse. By some strange deviation he soon wandered from the subject, and, for over an hour, devoted himself to the horrors of African slavery. It was the most stirring, energetic and masterly speech on that matter which I ever heard.

If there is such a thing as eloquence for modern minds, it should not require much of it to make any intelligent man realize that want of respect for a brute, want of respect for a nigger and want of respect for the clearest individual rights of those nearest and dearest to him, all rest on one common criminal defect of judgment and will, and that he cannot protect the virtue of his wife, prevent his children from being brutally overridden, or enforce the smallest benefit from his own industry with any degree of manly energy unless he makes “common cause” with all who are inconsiderately abused.

[642]

The want of comprehensive, far extending prudence in the minds of the pioneers in this respect is just as obvious in their disposition to regard a criminal trial as a game between the accused person & a powerful association, foreign to themselves, called the Law, in which the accused is the weaker party, and stands most in need of aid and encouragement from mere spectators, as in their general disregard of fair play and readiness to sacrifice not merely the liberty, the happiness and means of living, but the lives, of others, in their frequent quarrels and tumults.

There were but few men among the pioneers who were not aware that in a community ruled according to law, they would have been made to feel themselves degraded and disgraced by the courses of life into which they had cast themselves and in which they were disposed to continue. So long as it was a fair race in carelessness and recklessness, a mere dash in the dark; so long as a man felt that he could hold his own, in a contest of short-wittedness, so long he would be perfectly willing to do without any law at all, but as this could not be the case for a single month with all, the wiser minds were at any early stage prepared to welcome the forms of a legal organization because they would perceive that they could have its strength on their side. No one would demand any more law, however, or any more strength in the hands of the representatives of the law than he judged would be perfectly convenient to himself. The friends of law would want strength enough in the law to help them protect themselves from the more reckless and dashing, but any more than this they would feel to be oppressive. Accordingly a considerable part of the community regarded the law as so much added to the strength of those who were not likely to be on their side in any contest and the remainder sustained the law just so far as, with the very feeble degree of power in looking far ahead or through a complicated process which they were accustomed to exercise in judging of their own interests, they felt inclined to do so.

To illustrate how far this was likely to be, I can imagine a man presenting himself to my friend M. and saying, “Stranger, I got into a scrimmage in the saloon over yonder and shot a man and the Sheriffs after me. Can you lend me a hole to hide in?” M. has himself been in a scrimmage twenty times and has drawn his revolver and if he has not shot men has come so near to it that so far from shrinking from his visitor on that account, he is, always supposing him to be a white man & to speak English, rather drawn to him by sympathy. For the moment he thinks of the Sheriff only as another white man; the Sheriff for all that he knows might just as well be “after” him. He would, as in fact I suppose he did, more than once, without hesitation give the murderer all the advantage for outwitting the Sheriff that he conveniently could. If this was the case with the American pioneers, far more so was it with the very large number of the more sober class of foreign born, who had been [643]brought up to regard officers of the law as their masters or as the instruments of their masters, not in the least as their own agents.

(The disposition of juries to move in the same way.)

The progress of improvement is said to have been astonishingly rapid, but it has not advanced so far that the influence of the same habits of thought is not yet perceptible, although on ordinary occasions, a good deal complicated and obscured by more mature and wiser counsels.

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[42: 472–77] At a late election chiefly for County officers the canvass has been very hot. There were some extremely bad men nominated by the Democratic party, a majority of the members of which are Secessionists. As this party was successful at the previous (Presidential election), I was apprehensive these men would be elected, especially as the candidate for the more lucrative office, was a bold gambler, and was known to have disposed of considerable property, that he might be well supplied with cash. He made a very strong fight, getting in at my own poll the votes of a lunatic, a born idiot, and of a number of half-breeds who could not speak English & who had never been seen in the vicinity before. Some of these as they approached carried a vote in one hand and money in the other. They were all challenged, and all “swore in” their votes; committing perjury, as I have very little doubt. At the polls where he was personally present, this candidate ran far ahead of his ticket and of the vote of his party at the preceding election. Nevertheless, he and the worst candidates on the ticket with him were defeated in the County. I understand that he has stated that he would have been successful if some upon whom he depended at the polls which he could not personally overlook, had not played him false.

I had subscribed to the election fund against him, and was by special circumstances very intimate with & in the confidence of some of the leading men of both parties, and I have taken some pains to learn the secret history of the election. I believe that the defeated candidate had paid out with reference to the election about eight thousand dollars. A part of this however, was merely the payment of debts of long standing, and which probably never would have been paid under other circumstances. He probably paid five thousand in direct bribes to secure the services of certain persons, chiefly keepers of taverns or groggeries, who were also owners or part owners of mines, mills or shops, or who in some other way employed or influenced the employment of a number of laborers. To one such man whom I know very well he paid one thousand dollars; to another, a drover and butcher, five hundred dollars. I asked one of the managers of the successful ticket how it had been possible to defeat him. He replied in substance as follows: [644]

His party is composed largely of Arkansas men (frontier men) and foreigners. Most of the foreigners can always be bought, all the Arkansas men can. The only difficulty about it is that when we buy them, we can’t depend on them. They take money from both sides & promise & swear to each alike. The only way to hold them is to pay them something down at the last moment & promise them something more & show them the money to be paid contingent upon the vote at the precincts where you expect them to operate. We kept a close watch on X and got pretty accurate information of how much money he could command, and we took care at the close to be prepared to “go better.” He had bought ______ for $1000. On the night before election I saw ______ and gave him $500 and told him I would give him $600 more after the election if we were ahead in his precinct. I assumed of course in talking with him that he was on our side, always had been, that he was deeply interested, and that he would need all of this, for election expenses; treating, printing and all that. I suppose he did use some of it so. He kept a free bar on election day, and I guess he promised to forgive a number of men small debts on condition that they should show him their tickets at the polls. Of course it was known how he was going to vote by all his crew, early in the morning.

We carried the precinct by twenty majority (last year it was carried against us by the same vote). So it was elsewhere. We were generally able to make the last bid, and on election morning we had the longest purse to show. We raked and scraped every dollar that could be found to do it.

(This was so much the case that there was a notable scarcity of coin in the usual channels for a short time after the election.) I took considerable pains to ascertain who the men were who had received the benefit of this expenditure, and could hear of but one native American of the free states who was included among them. Several foreigners and Southerners who had been previously regarded as Secessionists and who voted for McClellan at the previous election, were bribed successfully by the Unionists, to my knowledge. I think that the whole amount of money expended by both parties, with reference to the election, was equal to the amount of one dollar for each vote cast. Nine tenths of this money was contributed by the candidates and about one half of it was expended with the knowledge and intention of the candidates that it should be the direct pecuniary consideration of votes.

I am told that this election has been an exhibition of purity and respectability compared with those which were common here at the earlier elections. And I have heard narratives from men who had a hand in that of which they tell which almost justify the assertion. The hero of one of the worst of these stories and bearing a most disgraceful and disgusting part in it, is now a Senator of the United States. We have a great deal of statesmanship in Washington which has been acquired in the same school and there are men who are proud of the circumstance.

[645]

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[42: 491] The only ecclesiastical organization which seems to be administered with any thorough system, constancy and steadiness is that [of) the Roman Catholic Church. The official representative of the hierarchy of Rome is a French priest of the ______ order. He is well-bred, and learned; probably more so than any other man who has any direct personal relations with the people here. He is withal a modest, zealous, heroic man. I have known him to ride forty miles by mountain trails on a stormy night, swimming torrents by the way and encountering other great perils to visit a Mexican woman whose friends had sent for him, believing her to be near death. Nearly all his time seems to be taken up with duties to individuals, visiting the sick and wounded, baptizing children and attending funerals. His parish extends some hundred miles to the North and South of us and is limited to the Eastward only by the presence of hostile savages. I have met him but once, when he called on me in a matter of business and was induced to spend an hour or two with my family, who found him one of the most urbane, entertaining and instructive visitors that had ever come under our roof. But after all, I think it would be hard to find a man who appeared to be more unsympathetic and outside of the whole ordinary life of the people, even those of his own creed, a man more incapable of entering into their minds and of influencing them, except as an authority and a dealer who—as it might be—had certain articles of clothing which they might need to sometimes wear & which they could get only of him and which he would supply as a duty delegated to him, which his honor required him to fulfil to the uttermost and at whatever peril or actual suffering to himself. Twelve miles from us on one side and forty on the other there are small wooden churches, at one of which mass is ordinarily celebrated every Sunday.

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[42: 598–614] Except by the clergymen of the Roman Catholic Church and such others as are bound to abide by ritualistic forms and as are responsible to authorities resident in better organized communities, public religious worship is very rarely conducted in a manner which is solemn, dignified or in any way attractive to the mass of settlers, I should use stronger language to express personal experience of it. Of my five thousand nearest neighbors I doubt if ten per cent have taken part in a religious exercise in the last ten years. This is chiefly oweing to the repulsions and jealousies which exist between the sects and schools within sects by reason of which any simple whole souled purpose of preaching Christianity and especially any general efficient cooperation for that purpose [646]is impossible. The people here have been educated under several scores of so called churches.

Chief difficulty that the main object of religious services is ordinarily to glorify a particular organization of Christians, to progagate the tenets which it has adopted and denounce as unscriptural, unchristian and of infidel tendency those of which are held by other organizations, of some of which other the parents and dearest friends of nine tenths of the constituents of every community are likely to have been representatives. As under this barbaric, disintegrating management of the pastoral duty the pastor can have the hearty good will of but a few among any body of settlers, the members of his flock are generally widely scattered, incapable of effective cooperation, and the organization miserably weak, unreliable, disunited, stingy and poor. He is consequently driven to employ dramatic & sensational expedients to secure a sufficient basis for his own support. These expedients in the end do not favor a general improvement of the moral condition of the people but in the minds of many they do favor a habit of disdain for and a feeling of superiority to what is deemed the humbug and pretentious assumptions of those who set themselves up as the only authorized representatives of true Christianity. I must confess that those things which here stand as representative of the Church of Christ do not seem to be as well calculated to educate the people in habits of neighborly, catholic, large & generous sympathy which is the essence of Christianity, as in narrowing tribal self conceits and repulsions. Except of the Roman Catholic, I should judge that the number of sincere, interested disciples of the strongest of them does not exceed four per cent and of each on an average less than one per cent of the whole population.

There are nevertheless two or three buildings in the county which have been erected by the efforts of members of as many different churches or sects of Protestants, besides the places of worship of the Chinese, which are more numerous than those of the Christians. The former have all been built under the pressure of some special effort and excitement, which has long since passed off. They now without exception have a neglected, forsaken, delapidated and shabby appearance which is truly typical of the condition of their respective proprietorships. The only one of them in which services are held with constant regularity is avowedly attended by a considerable part of the small congregation which goes through the forms of worship therein not from religious motives, but because it has become the representative of a political faction and many of its supporters lead notoriously villainous lives.

There are several residents in the county who are called ministers, but I believe only one of them is under an engagement with any organization to act as its pastor with an obligation on the part of the organization to provide his means of living. The one who is so seems not [647]to have been educated for the profession, to judge from his misuse of language. For instance, I have twice known him to speak of himself publicly as the Prelate of his congregation, apparently imagining that word to have the same meaning with preacher. On one of these occasions, however, mendicant would have been the more appropriate word. There are few things hereabouts that have seemed to me more abominable than the organization for servility, cowardice and general degradation of the representative of the civilized system of religious worship of which this man is the victim. An unskilled laborer here, a man who cannot read and who cannot count twenty, may get the wages of seven hundred dollars a year. This is for eight or ten hours’ labor per diem, after doing which he may earn something more if he is disposed to do more work. This minister’s regular wages under his contract with his church do not exceed half that amount. Whatever else he receives for his own support and that of his family he receives literally as a starving beggar receives it and with expressions of dependence and gratitude which would be proper to a starving beggar. He has a wife and several children. I doubt if there is as large a white family within a thousand miles of us whose provision if purchased at the ordinary tradesman’s prices would not cost much more than the amount of this minister’s salary. His daughters growing into womanhood are not dressed as well as most paupers in England. I am informed by one of his neighbors that they are sometimes kept indoors from regard to decency and that there have been at least two occasions within the last two years when the family lived for several days on meal and water, and when there was not a cent of money or more than a pan full of meal left in the house. Finding at these times that their servant was likely to die on their hands if nothing was done, some of his employers, women mainly if not altogether, have then set to work to organize begging expeditions and with contributions thus obtained they have replenished his stock and clothed his children. Most of the money has been obtained by school girls or young women who in a thoroughly civilized state of society would have been school girls, who have gone about in small companies calling at every white man’s house, shop, office or digging within the beat which they took upon themselves to canvass and soliciting or demanding contributions of all without being particular as to their special personal religious opinions and obligations, their condition or their character. Of me they demanded a contribution most impudently and immodestly. They visited a gambling saloon and bar-room and interrupted the men before the bar and those who were playing at the time and got from each of them the price of a drink or a cigar. My informant who was present said that notwithstanding their own impoliteness they were treated with respect and deference and that each man made a contribution Quickly with the desire to hasten them from a place in which not so much the impertinence as the impropriety of their visit [648]was found to be painful to its ordinary visitors. Heathen Chinamen have been called upon and have contributed to these Christian foraging parties. But the sum total of all the poor beggar’s income is not probably more than that which the public provides for its poorest mixer of fancy drinks, mule-driver or coal burner. It pays its Sheriff at least ten times as much, and the difference in valuation of the services of each thus represented is not as great by any means, I think, as the difference in the power to influence the character of the community which is respectively exercised by the minister of religion & the minister of law.

As I have said, there are several other men who preach occasionally but none with nearly the same appearance of influence or standing in the community as this settled pastor. There are some Mormons here, all Englishmen I believe, and a considerable number of families who belong to a religious organization which originated in the Slave States, and who are all of the class of poor whites, exceedingly ignorant and exceedingly hateing and despising all who have book-learning, it being one of their tenets that religion is the peculiar property of the poor and ignorant and that all others are the Devil’s own. It was at a protracted meeting of this sect, at which Elder Brown and Elder Bounce alternately led the services that the following dialogue occurred:

Elder Brown in the midst of a discourse setting forth the claims of his organization as the true church. “We’s the uns that enters in dar—ain’t we Brother Bounce?”

Brother Bounce from his seat in the midst of the congregation. “You bet we is, Brother Brown.”

A camp-meeting is held every year in the county, in connection [with) which there are horse-races, gambling booths and other facilities for amusement. The camp meeting indeed seems to be the principal holiday of a considerable class of the population and that by no means a religious class. I have not attended any of these meetings but have met troops of drunken fellows, all well armed, riding home from them. They do not differ in character or in incident materially from those which have been often described by travellers in the Slave States.

Some readers will infer from what I have said that there are no representatives of the Christian ministry here who stand in any relationship to the people which is compatible with self respect or extended personal influence favorable to nobility of character or even to common morality. Many exceptions must be allowed for, if all frontier populations, or all sparsely settled wilderness populations, are to be judged by this one in this respect, but that the rule may with this caution be safely inferred from these statements all I have seen of the back settlements of the South and West, leads me to believe.

At points which I have visited, nearer the Pacific where the progress of the settlement of which was earlier and the progress of which [649]has been less fluctuating, I have found a very great improvement in the habits of the people, greater efficiency of the law and all healthy social institutions in a much more flourishing condition on an average than they are here. And in settlements of a corresponding class formed fifty years ago in States East of the Mississippi a still higher advance in most of the more important characteristics of a civilized community is obvious.